Data communication networks serve user communication devices with user data services like internet access, media conferencing, machine communications, social networking, and the like. To extend the range and mobility of these user data services, the data communication networks deploy wireless access networks. The wireless access networks have wireless access points that communicate over the air with wireless communication devices. The wireless communication devices could be computers, phones, media players, machine transceivers, and the like.
The wireless access networks also have wireless network cores with mobility controllers, data gateways, user databases, and other network elements. Current wireless access networks attach wireless communication devices to the wireless network cores based on the user device identity and load-balancing algorithms like round-robin. Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks typically attach User Equipment (UE) to LTE Evolved Packet Cores (EPCs) based on the UE's International Mobile Subscriber Identifier (IMSI) and geographic location.
In some examples, a specific wireless network core is selected based on a user-defined mode. For example, a user work mode directs the attachment of the UE to an employer network core. A user home mode directs the attachment of the UE to the user's home network core. Unfortunately, the user mode approach does not work as well with machine-to-machine communications sometimes called the Internet of Things (IoT). The multitude of IoT applications have a far more diverse set of communication modes than human users. Current wireless access points do not efficiently and effectively select wireless network cores in the rapidly expanding IoT environments.